Relatives weep for scores of missing children after deadly Indonesia school collapse
By late evening on Tuesday (Sep 30), three bodies had been recovered, with the vast majority of presumed victims still trapped under huge slabs of concrete.
A relative of a victim of a collapsed building reacts, after a hall collapsed while students were praying at the Al-Khoziny Islamic boarding school in Sidoarjo, East Java, Indonesia, Sep 30, 2025. (Photo: REUTERS/Dipta Wahyu)
SIDOARJO, Indonesia: Parents were desperately searching for scores of missing teenage boys feared trapped under huge piles of concrete on Tuesday (Sep 30), after an Islamic boarding school collapsed in Indonesia as pupils were praying inside.
Authorities said 91 people were listed as missing, after the Al Khoziny school building collapsed on Monday while pupils held late afternoon prayers in a mosque housed on a lower floor of a building whose upper floors were under construction.
The boarding school is in the East Java town of Sidoarjo, about 780km east of Jakarta.
By late evening on Tuesday, three bodies had been recovered, with the vast majority of presumed victims still trapped under huge slabs of concrete. Ninety-nine children and workers at the school survived.
Holy Abdullah Arif, 49, wept as he held up a picture on his mobile phone of his nephew Rosi, still listed among the missing. He described his frantic search for the boy in the ruins.
"I ran around screaming, 'Rosi! Rosi! If you can hear me and can move, get out!' And then a child was screaming back from the rubble, he was stuck. I thought that was Rosi, so I asked, 'Are you Rosi?' and the child said, 'God, no, help me!'"
Families clustered around a whiteboard with a list of the known survivors, searching for names of their children.
An excavator and a crane had been deployed to help rescuers shift the rubble, but Nanang Sigit, a local search and rescue official, said authorities would not use heavy equipment for fear of causing the remaining structure to collapse.
"The rescuers are still searching for 91 people," spokesperson of the disaster mitigation agency Abdul Muhari told Reuters, adding that 26 of the injured were still being treated at local hospitals.
The disaster mitigation agency said the building's foundations may not have been able to support the weight of construction on its fourth floor.
The Antara state news agency quoted school caretaker Abdus Salam Mujib as saying building work had ended for the day before the prayers but that the foundations could not support the construction that had taken place on the floors above.
Local media reports quoted a school official as saying the construction work had been ongoing for the past nine months.
The building collapsed after its foundation pillars failed to support the weight of new construction on the fourth floor of the school, according to BNBP spokesman Abdul Muhari.
He called for stricter safety standards and urged the public and building managers to oversee construction processes more carefully to prevent similar incidents.
Lax construction standards have raised widespread concerns about building safety in Indonesia, where it is common to leave structures -- particularly houses -- partially completed, allowing owners to add extra floors later when their budgets permit.
Earlier this month, at least three people were killed and dozens injured when a building hosting a prayer recital collapsed in West Java.
In 2018, seven teenagers rehearsing for a musical show were killed in Cirebon, east of Jakarta, when the building they were in collapsed.
That same year, at least 75 people were injured when the mezzanine floor at Indonesia's stock exchange building in Jakarta collapsed into the lobby.
